Our Critics' Picks for End-of-Summer Movies

Courtesy of Film Movement Neither Heaven Nor Earth: "Most war movies try to shock us with hard, brutal, tangible, sick-making images, demanding that we look at the visible proof — the blood and guts and other gore — that results from guns and bombs. In the searching, cogent Neither Heaven Nor Earth, director Clément Cogitore examines the horrors (and futility) of combat from a much different perspective, centering his feature debut on a French unit in Afghanistan whose soldiers inexplicably begin to vanish." — Melissa Anderson

Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures Little Men: "Little Men complicates and completes the cycle: The impassioned teens of the title, Jake (Theo Taplitz) and Tony (Michael Barbieri), spend their hours playing video games and dreaming of getting accepted into the LaGuardia high school for the arts, but they're not truly a couple. Are they gay? We can't say, really. What tingles between them, for most of the film, is the mysterious attraction of boyish friendship and the gently dangerous chance that it might flower into something more." — Alan Scherstuhl

Courtesy of Kino Lorber The Tenth Man (El rey del Once): "In his lovely new film, Argentine director Daniel Burman mixes reality with fiction in inventive ways. In Buenos Aires, there's a Jewish aid foundation run by a legendary figure known only as Usher. Burman sends the fictional Ariel (Alan Sabbagh, grand) on a one-week trip from New York to Buenos Aires to visit his father, Usher (playing himself), whom he both reveres and resents." — Chuck Wilson

Courtesy of Todo Cine Latino The Bride (La Novia): "The Bride is soaked in Lorca's fatalistic romanticism, but now its doomed love triangle is seen through the woman's conflicting needs: the safety offered by a wealthy, besotted groom (Asier Etxeandía) versus the reciprocal passion she feels with first love Leonardo (Álex García), who married her cousin (Leticia Dolera)." — Serena Donadoni

Courtesy of HBO Abortion: Stories Women Tell: "In 2014, Missouri passed a law that requires women to wait at least 72 hours between an initial doctor's appointment and having an abortion. Today, Missouri is one of the hardest states in the country in which to obtain the procedure. That's great news for anti-choicers. But for Amie, a 30-year-old single mother profiled in Tracy Droz Tragos' heart-rending HBO documentary Abortion: Stories Women Tell, the law is just another punishing obstacle." — Amy Brady

Lorey Sebastian Hell or High Water: "The muscle behind the robberies is Tanner — the hot-headed, trigger-happy sibling with a 10-year prison stint — but the airtight logic undergirding them is Toby’s responsibility. In order to keep the bank from foreclosing on their oil-rich family property, Toby devises a plan to hold up a string of branches for low-level amounts until they’ve compiled enough to pay back the deficit." — Danny King

Courtesy of Kino Lorber Ixcanul: "The United States looms over Jayro Bustamante's patient, observant, exquisitely painful debut feature, Ixcanul, just as it looms over the Guatemalan coffee plantation in which Bustamante's humane drama plays out. The film, a work of tender long-take portraiture, centers on María (María Mercedes Coroy), a Mayan teen betrothed to the plantation's distant overseer — and, more crucially, caught between her parents' traditional ways of living and a modern world that demands of her people something like indentured servitude." — Alan Scherstuhl

Courtesy of Focus Features Kubo and the Two Strings: "From its opening image — of a distraught woman battling massive ocean waves on a moonlit night — to its surprisingly ambiguous final shot — of what, I won't say — Kubo and the Two Strings sears itself into your brain. The stop-motion animation studio Laika has perfected, over the past decade or so, its own style of aesthetically acute storytelling: Previous efforts have remained indelible thanks to their striking, evocative visuals." — Bilge Ebiri

Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World: "Late in Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, his unsurprisingly wry, quizzical documentary survey on life inside and beside the virtual world, Werner Herzog stumps two brain researchers with a lyrical question in that instantly recognizable (and often parodied) German accent: 'Does the Internet dream of itself?'" — Aaron Hillis

Courtesy of A24 Morris From America: "In contemporary film, it’s typical for an African-American character to be the sole person of color in the story, his or her only reason for existence to reveal hidden racism or to make white people uncomfortable with themselves. Black characters rarely get to talk to other black characters. Last year, critic Manohla Dargis suggested a new Bechdel-type test (calling it the DuVernay test) to assess whether films feature 'African Americans and other minorities [who] have fully realized lives rather than serv[ing] as the scenery in white stories.' But even before that, writer Nikesh Shukla suggested his own test, which, to pass, a movie must (1) have at least two black characters, who (2) talk to each other about (3) something other than race." — April Wolfe

Courtesy of Strand Releasing Spa Night: "He's already racked with guilt from watching the costs of his education tear their marriage apart — in the film's most wrenching scene, we discover that David's father has slumped into a drunken stupor. David doesn't much like the idea of college anyway. His only solace is in the night cleaner job he voluntarily, secretly takes at an all-men's spa, where, he discovers, the after-hours sauna is a clandestine sexual free-for-all." — Sam Weisberg

Courtesy of Music Box Films Mia Madre: "The attempt to reconcile the personal with the political has been the great theme of Nanni Moretti's cinema, as it was for many of the legendary Italian directors before him. In Mia Madre, it finds one of its more vivid examinations. The film's concept is blunt — a director struggles with her dying mother's last days while trying to make a movie about a factory strike, and hilarity ensues (no, really) — but Moretti's follow-through is tender and nuanced. Mia Madre is a sad little film, and also a very funny one — which isn't so contradictory when the subject is the very inability to match thought and action, vision and reality." — Bilge Ebiri

Aiden Monaghan/20th Century Fox Morgan: "Nepotism is occasionally a positive, and not just for the direct beneficiary. Ridley Scott gave us Alien, with heroine Ripley and a memorable cast of ne’er-do-wells and villains with defined personalities. And now Scott’s son, Luke, who’s been shadowing his dad on his last few big-budget films, has delivered unto us a sci-fi thriller that would make any father proud. Morgan isn’t perfect. I called the ending 20 minutes in, but even if his film's plot is predictable, the younger Scott is returning the ensemble thriller to its roots with something far more important than an airtight story: compelling, well-drawn characters and the talented actors to play them." — April Wolfe

Our Critics' Picks for End-of-Summer Movies

Our film critics spent serious time in front of the big screen this month to pick their favorite films of August 2016. If a few haven't opened in a theater near you just yet, don't fret: There's always a chance you'll be able to stream them on your small screen.

Our film critics spent serious time in front of the big screen this month to pick their favorite films of August 2016. If a few haven't opened in a theater near you just yet, don't fret: There's always a chance you'll be able to stream them on your small screen.